Ice Men Cometh

On September 2, 2009, the World Wildlife Fund sponsored a remarkably touching public demonstration on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt square. Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo created a thousand diminutive men out of ice and then placed them on the steps of the Concert Hall, home to the renowned Berlin Konzerthausorchester. There she left them to melt under the hot late summer sun to draw attention to the melting of the polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet, which, the WWF warns, could lead to changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and the release of even more greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere.